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Creative experiential learning : engaging people in (micro) cultures of sustainability

University of British Columbia

This dissertation presents a dynamic model for creative experiential learning that engages people in sustainability challenges and other social practice research. The model’s evolution is described through creative and artistic practice situated in ecologically focused collaborations and through extensive cross-disciplinary encounters with the literature of experiential learning and change, phenomenological writings focused on embodiment, the ethics of care in feminist theory, and Indigenous scholars positioning land-based knowledge paradigms in relation to Western philosophical traditions. The dissertation itself embodies the entangled strands of research in these diverse fields as it investigates what constitutes knowledge and how ways of knowing are shifted, altered, deepened and shared through experience, art and education. The resulting creative methodology and model for creative experiential learning are presented as a useful design and learning approach and reflective research tool that can be activated by artists, scholars, and communities working in transdisciplinary sustainability contexts. At the heart of the model are methods that offer ways to imagine, enact and support creative spaces of interaction that engage people in sustainability through generating “(micro) cultures” – a term used to explore situations and processes that are intimate, focused and specific rather than based on making large-scale system changes. The model aims to generate these spaces in relation to sustainability challenges by orienting a person or people to a core concept: {land-self-people-place}. The dissertation uses this conceptual sign {land-self-people-place} to express a re-visioning of place that is interdependent and nested. Artistic practices contribute, through the concepts of socio-ecological aesthetics, collaborative play and entangled beauty, to creating productive (micro) cultures where people can engage in regenerative actions woven around environmental care. The narrative and lyric inquiry of the dissertation shift into the exploration of a formal assessment of the model in the evaluation processes of two complex interdisciplinary sustainability research projects: case studies evaluating three game play approaches in Future Delta 2.0, a climate change videogame; and collaborative knowledge sharing in The Social Life of Water, a public museum exhibition exploring human-water relationships in the Okanagan.

Text

2019-06-06

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/70559

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/